


If I choose to fall, who's to say it isn't flight?

by threadofgrace



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Chromatic Yuletide, F/F, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 12:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2812196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threadofgrace/pseuds/threadofgrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amelia moves to London to find herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I choose to fall, who's to say it isn't flight?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KayleeFrye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KayleeFrye/gifts).



> Thank you to egelantier and Kivrin for two invaluable and last minute beta'ing jobs. All remaining typos, etc. are my fault and mine alone. Thank you also to KayleeFrye for a cool prompt idea. To be honest, I hadn't given too much thought to Amelia one way or the other before this. I hope what follows was along the lines of what you wanted.

During

Pregnancy is hard on Amelia. More painful than what she expected. 

The pain starts early on as a low, bone-thrumming ache that settles in at her core, and then radiates outwards, until she feels like she’s vibrating when she walks. Also, she feels lonely all the time these days, like she’s watching the world through the glass haze of a fish tank, and is desperate for someone who she could reach out and touch. 

Siobhan smiles sympathetically when Amelia tells her this during an appointment, says ‘perfectly normal, this is all to be expected,’ and then gives her another shot. 

Siobhan is nothing but professional with Amelia these days, and this is another change, another reason for Amelia to feel alone.

 

Earlier

Amelia moves to London at twenty, for a fresh start. Really, a first start. Her first proper chance at a real life after a childhood spent growing up in a dingy flat in Bristol. She has no particular plans. Only now, for the first time in her life she is responsible to no one. There are no family ties anymore. No need to placate the consuming ambition of a working class immigrant mother with big plans for her daughter. She can be whoever she wants to be, even if that person ends up being no one in particular.

She finds a boring job at a clothing department store to pay her bills. She also finds a room to rent in an up-and-coming neighborhood. Once the necessities have been taken care of, she thinks vaguely that she might try on being an artist for a bit, see how it suits her. 

She meets Marcus at a posh gallery opening. He has absurd facial hair, an impossible to place foreign accent, and a tendency to go on at length about spatial theory in Kandinsky as a metaphor for late stage capitalism, but he is encouraging while she tries to learn how to sketch. They go on a few dates and bond over long, lingering conversations about the dehumanization of the workingman under Thatcher’s government. However, she gently breaks it off with him. Largely, she explains on account of the facial hair. With no outside force to encourage it, the sketchbook eventually gets consigned to a cupboard.

She hangs around with a political crowd some more after that, feeling more than a bit at loose ends but hoping to bolster her own identity on the strength of other people’s convictions. It’s at the tail end of this period that she firsts meets Siobhan. 

Amelia notices her soon after walking into the pub, a tall, intense brunette standing a little apart from the crowd, with a gaze that ping pongs around the room. Like recognizes like and they nod to each other, two loners in a sea of middle-class poseurs making a pretense at the bohemian lifestyle. They, at least, are honest in their lack of authenticity. They find each other a little later by the bar, share a pint, and trade stories about living lives before they quite what they want out of them.

Amelia learns that Siobhan is Irish and strong minded, a biology grad student of some sort, and with the same kind of demanding family that Amelia has. 

‘They want me to succeed here,’ Siobhan complains, draining her glass. ‘But I’m not quite sure they really know what that means, at least in my field. Because I’ve seen what success looks like, where I work at least…’ She shuts up, looking pensive.

Then they talk each other talk about things other than themselves and the conversation flows more easily. Siobhan is knowledgeable about politics, has a broader understanding of social justice, but she is also oddly dismissive of activism as a flashy trend.

Three or four pints in, as Siobhan is explaining to Amelia how she doesn’t quite believe in God, but her work has shown her that the beauty to be found in nature is infinite, maybe divine in its own right, Amelia takes her chance and kisses her. To her credit, Siobhan is only momentarily stunned before she starts kissing her back, just as forcefully.

They tumble into bed together and tumble into a relationship. Things are deceptively easy between them and they progress with all the speed of an oil slick. 

That first night in bed together in her tiny room, Amelia finds herself haltingly telling Siobhan of that last terrible day with her mother. Coming home early to find Amelia in the arms of a woman, an old school friend she didn’t even know that well. The ultimatums which followed. Amelia packing a bag, tears obscuring her vision. She had packed so quickly that night there were things she had left at her mother’s house, keepsakes she would have taken if she could have. She is afraid that her mother has thrown them all out by now, like so much garbage. 

‘You can’t choose your family… ’she finishes, somewhat lamely.

At this last, Siobhan guffaws loudly, and then collapses into helpless drunken giggles on the bed beside her. She refuses to tell Amelia the joke, only vaguely admitting under pressure that she’s thinking again of something to do with work.

Siobhan gets like this a lot, Amelia will learn over the following months. She can be very kind when needed. And she has a force of personality that draws Amelia to her with all the force of a planet’s gravity. But she has a tendency to act superior about her academic credentials, which ends up highlighting Amelia’s comparative lack of achievement in that area. And she is frequently shadowy and secretive about the nature of her day job.

 

Then a minor recession hits the economy and Amelia is laid off from her job at the department store. Amelia hits the streets with a dedication that she thinks, ironically, her mother would have been proud of. But no one is hiring, and especially no one is hiring twenty-one year old black girls with no advanced degree and minimal professional experience to speak of. By the time she is more than a week late on rent, Amelia finally agrees to accept a small amount from Siobhan - as a loan, to be paid back in full - to cover rent and the rest of her basics. 

Siobhan is either studying or working all the time these day, or busy making dense meandering scientific notation in a battered copybook. On this particular day she is staring out Amelia’s window with her notebook in her lap, thinking deep thoughts that she doesn’t care to share. Amelia happens to be feeling exhausted and irritable after another day spent unsuccessfully job hunting and she’s in no mood to put up with feeling like Siobhan’s slow kid sister who can’t quite keep up.

‘What if…’ Siobhan says slowly into the silence, clearly having made her mind up about something. ‘What if I had a way for you to make your rent money for a year or more? And you would be doing something really special, contributing to really important science?’

‘What if I don’t want to do something special?’ Amelia asks, already feeling predisposed to an argument. “What if I just want to be normal and get along and pay the bills like everyone else?’

“Well then,” Siobhan considers for a moment. “Think about it as doing something natural then. How would you feel about getting paid handsomely to be pregnant?” 

Amelia thinks about it. She thinks about her mother, who had worked so hard to make sure that Amelia would make something out of her life, and not end up like she had, single and pregnant. Her mother, who had rejected Amelia the second she had expressed a desire to deviate, only a little, from that imagined future. She finds herself agreeing to Siobhan’s plan, in part, out of spite. It’s an ugly, embarrassing emotion. But it would her pay her bills. And perhaps, she would finally get to find out a little more about what Siobhan did all day. 

 

During – Week One

 

Siobhan takes Amelia with her to work the next day and that’s the beginning of the end of the two of them. It’s the first day that she begins to have trouble distinguishing Siobhan from the sea of people in white coats that break in waves around her. 

Work turns out to be a very indistinguishable office building, full of clinical looking hallways, and blank faced men and women in scrubs. Amelia is promptly in a room alone and is put through a battery of tests. She is told little, very little. Siobhan comes occasionally to check on her, but by this stage, she is no more forthcoming than anyone else has been. Needles are shoved into her arms and Amelia is drained of more things than she had thought possible. Other needles pump fluids back into her, along with other things she doesn’t want to think about. Papers are shoved in front of her, full of fine print, and she signs them, dazedly. Any thoughts she had ever entertained about receiving answers, or at least fuller explanations about what she was doing there are abandoned. 

Three days later, Amelia is allowed to go home again, once they are very certain that the insemination process took and that she is stable. During this early and fragile stage, she will be coming in no less than five times a week for appointments, but she is allowed at least to sleep in her own bed. 

Before she leaves, she meets with Siobhan again who explains that she has been informed that the two of them will have to limit their contact while Amelia is a subject, to prevent any conflict of interest.

After two days of watching Siobhan in what Amelia has come to think of as Siobhan’s natural environment, Amelia is less upset about this disclosure than she might otherwise have been.

 

During - 22 Weeks 

It’s months into her pregnancy when she feels the first tiny finger of movement unfolding in her belly. She waits for it to happen again, waits to feel some sort of spiritual connection with these passengers inside of her, the way she thinks pregnant women are suppose to feel. What is happening in her body doesn’t feel in any way spiritual, however. It feels eminently, totally physical. 

She is bigger than she expected to be. The doctors finally admit to her that two of the fetuses implanted. She is carrying twins. She thinks vaguely that this is the sort of news that is supposed to be shared with other people under normal circumstances. But Siobhan’s presence by this time is the merest shadow on the edge of her life. And she can’t think of anyone else to whom she could even begin to explain this. 

 

During - 26 weeks

It’s 6 months into her pregnancy when Amelia finally hears the word clone, and it’s not from Siobhan. Its not even anything she was meant to have heard. An overheard reference in a quick hallway exchange between two lab techs, while Amelia is waiting in a hospital gown with her knees up for her regularly scheduled appointment. The door had been left slightly ajar. Those few centimeters make the difference. 

She calls Siobhan and finally confronts her in person about everything. All of Siobhan’s manipulations. The true purpose of what Siobhan has gotten her involved. It’s like she has been drugged for months and is just now waking up to discover that she is furious. 

Siobhan is withering, dismissive in the face of Amelia’s her outrage. She merely asks Amelia what exactly she thought had been going on all these months, what exactly she had thought she had signed up for, and why she hadn’t pressured Siobhan harder in the first place. 

Amelia responds that this is not precisely the point. That maybe she had tried at first not to think about the implications of it all, but she had placed her trust in Siobhan. And then later, once she was abandoned by Siobhan and alone with her own body, she hadn’t been able to see anything clearly, and hadn’t wanted to look. 

Well then, Siobhan says steadily. You had better start looking now. And decide what you want to do about what you see.

 

During - 30 weeks

She she thinks about the implications all the time now. For her. For her children. They aren’t her children, but they might as well be. She is as much of a mother as these two will ever have. She knows this now, can tell it to herself honestly.

Mothers shouldn’t make choices for their children.

That’s something she thought she knew.

 

During - 35 weeks 

Amelia writes a note for Siobhan. It may be foolish and she hopes she hasn’t inadvertently given Siobhan the keys to tracking her down. But she has to try. She has to let someone know that she’s thought this through. How sure she is that what she’s doing is the right thing. 

During - 35 weeks, 4 days

It takes no time at all, once the decision has been made. Merely the calling in of a few favors to some old acquaintances on the political fringe. However, when Amelia walks into the safe house, Siobhan is sitting at the table, wearing a relieved expression on her face. Amelia is furious.

Her anger increases as Siobhan tells her about the underground network that she's involved in, the fight to save children from being victimized by a corporation. 

And Siobhan's decision to bring Amelia into this? To convince her to put her body on the line, for something that Siobhan knew from the start was corrupted? 

Siobhan admits to the manipulation, but claims it was only to get Amelia on board for the fight. To make sure that after a life of uncertain, half made choices, Amelia would finally be ready to commit to something that was after all, incredibly dangerous.

And if Amelia hadn’t come to the right conclusions by herself, then Siobhan wouldn’t have pushed her. She would have given birth to her children and gone on her way, in denial, but at least handsomely rewarded. And Siobhan would have done her best to collect the babies if she could.

But Siobhan had trusted her and Amelia had come to the correct conclusions and gotten herself and her daughters out of there. And now Siobhan was here to help with the last leg of it: to see Amelia safely through birth, and to make sure her children were safe. 

But Siobhan doesn’t see - or refuses to see-that any trust they ever had between them is now a fractured and broken thing, and Amelia’s not sure it will ever be able to be repaired.

Amelia agrees to the help, lets Siobhan see the anger draining out of her, and lets her assume that means she is pacified. This doesn’t mean she isn’t willing to fight this, for her children’s sake, if not for her own. But she refuses to let anyone else dictate terms to her. 

So, later that night, she sneaks out of the house and catches the first bus out of town that she can find. She’ll do her best to find places for her children that would allow them to grow up with options, as people and not as lab experiments. As for herself, well, she’ll fight, and hopefully, through that, she’ll find herself. She’s begun again before and she can do so again.


End file.
